Dr Vitali Averbukh

EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellow

Department of Physics, Imperial College London

PH: 44 (20) 7594 7746
Email: [email protected]
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Background

I am a theoretician who joined the Quantum Optics and Laser Science group of the Blackett laboratory in 2010. I study fundamental electronic processes that occur in molecules and clusters following excitation and/or ionisation, for example by a laser pulse. These electronic rearrangements, such as Auger decay, interatomic (intermolecular) Coulombic decay (ICD) and others, are driven by electron-electron interaction and are the basic manifestation of the electron correlation in nature. The decay processes lead to emission of electrons and often also to dissociation of a molecule or a cluster. They are of high practical importance for estimation and understanding of the radiation damage done by high-frequency radiation. I use the first principles many-electron theoretical methods to investigate the complex dynamics of the known electronic rearrangements and to predict new physical phenomena of this type.
I completed my PhD on atoms and molecules in high intensity laser fields in Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in 2001 with Nimrod Moiseyev. In 2003 I moved to Heidelberg University (Germany), where I worked with Lorenz S. Cederbaum on the theory of ICD in clusters. In 2007 I was granted an independent research position at the Finite Systems department (Director: Jan Michael Rost) of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (Dresden, Germany). In 2009 I was awarded the Career Acceleration Fellowship by the EPSRC to start a new theoretical group at the Blackett laboratory of Imperial College London.Currently two PhD positions in my group are available